Spener, PHILIPP JAKOB, an illustrious German reformer, and the founder of the movement known as Pietism, was born at Rappoltswiler in Upper Alsace, January 13, 1635. Pious from his cradle, he studied at Strasburg, where in Johann Schmid he found his 'father in Christ.' Next he studied under the younger Buxtorf at Basel, afterwards visiting Geneva, Stuttgart, and Tübingen. In 1663 he became a preacher at Strasburg, and three years later was transferred to Frankfurt, and here he laboured with the most devoted zeal to reawaken the dormant and mechanical Christianity of the day by constant catechising and earnest preaching based on Scripture and Christian experience. Yet Spener was the very opposite of what is commonly called a mystic. The devotion which he sought to excite was not to show itself in transcendental ecstasies, but in acts of piety, humility, and charity. He had a strong aversion to formal theology, which he considered a hateful caricature of the free word of life; and he commenced in the year 1670, at his house, meetings for the cultivation of evangelical morality. Out of these grew the famous collegia pietatis, whose influence for good on the German character, in those days of stony and barren orthodoxy, cannot easily be overvalued. His earnest and plain-spoken Pia Desideria (1675) spread the movement far beyond the range of his personal influence, but aroused the enmity of many in high places. In 1686 he became court preacher at Dresden and member of the Upper Consistory. Here he infused new life into the theological teaching of the university of Leipzig, despite the opposition of Carpov and others; but, having in 1689 rebuked the Elector Johann Georg III. for his vices, he soon found his position so intolerable that he gladly accepted an invitation to Berlin to become Provost of the church of St Nicholas and consistorial inspector, offices which he retained to the end of his life. The Elector of Brandenburg encouraged his efforts after religious reform, and entrusted theological instruction in the new university of Halle to Francke, Breithaupt, Anton, and other disciples of Spener—the later leaders of the pietistic movement. This excited great irritation in the theological faculties of Wittenberg and Leipzig, which formally censured in 1695 as heretical no less than 264 propositions drawn from Spener's writings. Spener died at Berlin, February 5, 1705, leaving behind a reputation for piety, wisdom, and practical Christian energy which all the excesses of the later pietists have not obscured. Indeed Ritschl (Gesch. des Pietismus) maintains that he himself was not a Pietist, having no part in their characteristic quietist and separatist instincts.
His writings are numerous; the chief are Pia Desideria (1675), Das geistliche Priesterthum (1677), Christliche Leichenpredigten (13 vols. 1677), Des tätigen Christenthums Nothwendigkeit (1679), Klagen über das verdorbene Christenthum (1684), Evangelische Glaubenslehre (1688), and Theologische Bedenken (5 vols. 1700-2). See J. G. Walch, Religionsstreitigkeiten der Lutherischen Kirche (5 vols. 1730-39); the Lives by Hossbach (1828; 3d ed. 1861), Thio (1841), Wildenham (1847; trans. by Wenzel, Phila. 1881), and Grünberg (1892-97).